Design, deconstruction, and development details of our indie RPG!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of July 20, 2015

Earlier today Becca sent me some new overworld tiles, so I’ll do a take two on putting up a bonus post later this week with some updated images. =) Until then, though, I realized over this past week that even though I can’t show things like dungeon layouts for reasons of spoilers, I can show off Becca’s pixel art in another way…

Battlefield screens!

Look, look, it’s some of Becca’s artistry. :D I could put it to much better use than I have so far, believe me, but these are works in progress after all. Actually, in a way I’m worried what Becca might think when she sees this—I bet there are at least a dozen neat little visual tricks I could do with her pixel art that I haven’t figured out. Nonetheless, even for what I have so far they’re some beautiful environments, right? ♥

A lot of the vertical space at the bottom will also be eaten up by menus when I have real art for that instead of ugly placeholders meant for testing (not shown here :P), so the layouts are 100% subject to change. Also, each of these screenshots has a lot of empty space toward the left side since that’s where the enemies are going to be and I don’t know how much space they’ll take up.

Speaking of that…

…compared to this Final Fantasy VI image, you might notice that there’s a lot more visible horizontal space. Perhaps too much? Yes, I’d say so! To be honest, I’m not totally decided on what resolution or even aspect ratio Dreamblazers will be in, so I just designed a much larger space than needed. If I aim for a more SNES-like style, it could look like this:

A GBA-like style would look like this:

And a widescreen resolution would look like this:

But what if I end up going for the full 1920×1080? I could take that widescreen shot and crank it up to 400% size:

Or I could go back and use a larger battlefield so that I only have to turn the pixels up to 300%:

I don’t know what I’ll end up with, but we’re one step closer to finding out if the prospective monster artist lives up to her samples! Being able to put in real non-placeholder creatures will help give me a better sense of space.